For me, the "Back it up in a place you trust" is coming back to square 1 of the parent poster's problem. I actually do have my photos on (a few) disks and computers, not on Google, and I still have the problem that I want to hurl money somewhere and say, "use this money..."

I'm kinda hoping for some open-source solution to emerge based on IPFS or the like, which would let me easily control replication of my photos & vids over a few local disks (probably via some local NAS machine[s]), and some online paid pinning service.

There are apparently some efforts towards something like that in the IPFS community [1][2], but no clear winner yet I think, or at least especially no good UI/UX for this yet.

[1]: https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47

[2]: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-cluster/issues/157

edit: some random service/startup which I just googled up which apparently tries to fit into this area, linking here to hopefully match them with potentially interested users, and thus maybe help them reach critical mass: https://www.reddit.com/r/ipfs/comments/846e64/photo_backup_a...

Yes, that is the problem I'm trying to articulate. Of course you ask a ton of engineers and you get engineering solutions. =)

What I want is a holistic solution. "I have money and I have data that I want taken care of. I don't want to do much work and I don't want to think about it more than once a year or two."

Takeout is great, but it has one major flaw. There is no way to download only data that has changed after a specified date, i.e no incremental backups.

There is also no "Take in". Your data might be all in that file, but without a lot of effort, you aren't going to be able to get it back into a usable form, with Google apps or a competitor.

It's not so bad actually.

The Google Drive files are exported as you would expect and you can just copy them into some other sync folder as is. Takeout transforms any Google Docs and Sheets into Word and Excel formats (configurable), so you don't end up with links into your disabled Google account (contrary to how their Backup and Sync client works).

Emails are exported as mbox files, calendars in ics format. It's pretty easy to import everything using widely available email and calendar clients. It's also pretty easy to put it all back into another Google account, but you're right, it's not as simple as importing the entire takeout zip file in one piece.

What I haven't tried is what happens to files that were shared with you. I would expect that they don't get exported because it's someone else's data after all.

I think if the purpose is to let you move all your data to a different provider and avoid any lock-in, then Google Takeout is an honest and practical solution.

It's clearly not meant as a routine backup solution though.